About Me

Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal.
Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Wednesday, August 02, 2017

Dems call on Trump to defend DACA

A group of Democratic lawmakers wrote President Trump Tuesday, calling on him to maintain and protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amid intense speculation over how Trump will handle the Obama-era program.

“On June 29, the Texas Attorney General, along with nine other attorney generals, in an attempt to usurp your authority, delivered to you an ultimatum threatening a legal challenge to DACA unless you ended the program by September 5, 2017,” reads the letter, penned by Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.).

“We urge you to respond to Texas’s threat to your executive authority by directing the Attorney General to use all legal options to defend DACA and ensure that nearly one million DREAMers continue to contribute to our nation.”

Under the program, over 750,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children received a work permit and protection from potential deportation.

Its opponents say the program is illegal because it was put in place though an executive order signed by President Obama instead of through legislation.

The letter, signed by 155 Democrats, asks Trump to keep the program in place and to instruct the Department of Justice to defend it from legal challenges.

Those programs had been blocked by courts, so their termination had no immediate effect on any immigrants.

But members of the administration, notably new chief of staff and former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, said DACA was on shaky constitutional ground and unlikely to survive a court challenge.

The Department of Justice has declined to say whether it will defend the program. In their letter, Democrats doubled down on their often-stated mistrust of the attorney general, an immigration hardliner.

“We are concerned that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has historically opposed DACA, is now trying to abrogate your authority and set the Administration’s immigration policies, when, ultimately, you hold that authority,” read the letter.

“Ending DACA would increase the nation’s undocumented population, profoundly and negatively impact our nation’s economy, contracting the nation’s GDP by $ 460.3 billion,” it reads, adding that ending the program would also reduce contributions to Social Security and Medicare by $24.6 billion over a decade, and cost businesses $3.4 billion in unnecessary turnover costs.